how to mix different size of hard disk in a volume with redundancy?

[delino]

Hello
Any advices would be appreciated, please excuse my english...
My objective is to build a NAS with:
- media streaming (itv, PS3, picture, music) services
- remote access from outside my LAN
- 1 volume for redundant memory (Raid Z i guess would be good)
- 1 volume for non redundant memory (Raid 0)
- both volume should be expendable for the future

I have
- Mobo: AMD processor 64 bit,
- RAM : 4Gig
- HD1 : 1x sata 2 To
- HD2: 1x usb external 1To
- HD3: sata 250 Go

1st question:
How could I use, in a good way, 2 different size of hard disk ( 1x 1To and 1x 2To) for 1 volume with redundancy? Would RAIDZ be a good choice?

2nd question:
For each HD, what formatting would you recommend? ZFS, UFS, ? which RAID for the 1st volume?

thanks

 

[toddos]

With that setup, the best you can do is a 1TB mirrored volume consisting of your 1TB and 2TB drives. The extra 1TB from the 2TB drive is effectively "lost". The only way to use it is to get a 2nd 2TB drive and mirror with that instead of trying to mirror the 1TB and 2TB drives together. RAIDZ requires at least three drives.

For the second question, I see no reason not to use ZFS.

 

[delino]

Thanks for the quick reply.
I will go get an other 2To hard disk in order to have a better use of my hard disk.

In that case since i'll be using only 2 disk for my "protected" volume, should i format my both 2To internal SATA disk in UFS? and build a RAID1 volume?
the other volumes will be also be formatted in UFS but with no redundancy.
thanks

 

[JaimieV]

You have enough RAM that you can use ZFS instead of UFS throughout, and gain the benefits of ZFS's data integrity checking, snapshots, and so on.

You build the RAIDZ1 directly from the two 2To disks, you don't format them first, by the way.